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Saturday, 1 June 2013

Learning Korean

My Korean teacher is a badass. That's a
horrendously overused word and I don't toss it around lightly. He
earned it. He teaches Korean with an attitude like, “Oh, it's you
people again. Well, I'm just going to think out loud about Korean
now, maybe write some things on the board. It's part of my process.
You're welcome to stick around and experience it if you wish.” But
then when the time comes he is very careful about actually going
around to each student in the class of about twenty and making sure
they have all, individually, understood the concept he has introduced
before he moves on. Sometimes he'll pick somebody at random and quiz
them. He doesn't hand out undeserved praise, and he'll laugh at
incorrect guesses – but not in a way like “Haha, God but you
suck,” more like “Look, we are learning a language! Isn't this
cool?!”

He also has the looks to be an actor, a
penchant for tardiness, a distant preoccupation that suggests a
storied past, and a fine wardrobe and sense of style. When I got
singled out twice in two classes I thought he was being hard on me,
but then I realised he was actually just treating me like an equal to
my peers. It's only that I've grown accustomed to being condescended
to. 10 times out of 10 I'll take the teacher, or the friend, or the
stranger who makes me work for my keep over the one who thinks I
can't tie my own shoelaces. A few weeks ago he introduced us to a
number of K-pop fixtures, because, after all, this is “Enjoyably”
Study Korean, so it's not all writing drills and call-and-response.
This turned out to be a great excuse to show off Bubble Pop during
class time. As if you need one.

Before we could get to this, though, we
had to endure a fairly brief and painless quiz. I'm finding hangul to
be elegant in its complexity, as every time I think I've more or less
grasped the gist of how letters come together to form characters, I
run across one in my blogsailing that stops me dead. I had this
faulty idea that all characters were made up of two to three letters;
I've actually seen some with, like, six. I'm horrified by the
knowledge that Korean has spelling, and it seems to be every bit as
bemusing as that of English. In Japanese, you can write a character
incorrectly, you can use the wrong one, you can mishear a long vowel
or a double consonant, but you can never actually misspell
a word. I've sort of grown accustomed to the idea that words in
foreign languages are just written the way they're written.

On
the other hand, whenever the day comes that I first decide to sit
down and read something in Korean of my own volition, even if I have
to look up every third word, at least I'll just be able to type it
into a dictionary and get the meaning instantly, rather than hunt
through a radical table making tactical use of the clipboard. Maybe
if I tried to read 1Q84 in Korean I'd be more than 15% of the way
through after working at it for six months. I'll tell you one thing
that Japanese has over Korean, though: If I see a Japanese word I
don't know, I can scan over a character, or even part of a character,
and work out an idea of what it might mean, maybe even look at the
tsukuri and guess at one of the Chinese readings. I can't say for
sure, but I imagine you could probably study Korean for several years
without ever realising that
the connection between hwisa (会社)
and sahwi (社会)
is more than coincidental.
Realistically, my own Korean etymology is unlikely to ever reach that
level. I am still quite satisfied with my gradual progress
towards Korean semi-literacy however, and was even pleased to find
that 가(ka) has stopped saying フト
to me. Unfortunately, the 0101 on the side of the Marui
Building now says 이이(i i).

For the quiz, we were given a list of
21 words to memorize, 10 appeared on the test, and we were tasked
with translating them from Japanese into Korean. To study, I sat down
a few times for a few minutes each and did a little bit of rote
memorization. Quizzed myself when I started feeling confident, took
another look at the ones I got wrong. It was great. It felt like
good, honest work. My level of success enjoyed a direct relationship
with my level of effort. See, the point where I'm at in Japanese, I'm
starting to really dig into the meat of the language, and everything
I learn is all abstract concepts, subtly different technical terms,
and grammar points that have usage notes like “only to be used
immediately after a refreshing rain on a fine summer's day when the
speaker is wearing purple socks, barring any exceptions as detailed
in Appendix Q.” For this Korean test, I memorized words like “dog”
and “I.” Kasu is kashu. Toro is douro. Great, got it!

Korean, at this point, is still
something I can sit back and relax with, the way a hockey player
might relax with an exercise bike after a tough practise. It's still
a toy, a parlour trick, not something I'm using to communicate with
people, yet. I haven't experienced frustration at not being able to
express myself adequately, or had my pride injured through not
knowing something I should have learned by now. There was definitely
a time, after I'd mastered the basics but before I stopped sucking at
it, that I had a lot more hate than love for the Japanese language. I
was Rocky, Japanese was Apollo Creed, and the first movie had just
ended; I was lying beaten and bloody on the floor, and for a while
there I seriously considered giving up on it completely. It was just
too hard. The grammar was too alien, the kanji too numerous. Every
time I reached a new plateau I saw that the peak was farther away
than I'd thought. But I persevered, the sequel came, and this time I
won. Japanese started working for me.
But it was a long and lonely road to get there, and if I continue
with Korean, eventually I'll arrive at the same crisis.

All of
this raises the question of how far I plan to go with my Korean.
It'll never be as good as my Japanese is now; I know at least that
much. Japanese has almost a decade's headstart, I started learning
when I was still physically almost a child, and this is the language
of the country that I intend to spend my life in. It dominates my
attention, and I can't see any other hobby ever displacing it
(unless, to continue the above analogy, Korean turns out to be
Ivan Drago). My interest in Korean is much less fundamental; it comes
from a desire to speak with Koreans, maintain numerical parity with
Europeans, and impress Japanese. In any case, I don't think I'll ever
just stop learning now that I've started, but if I can get to the
level where I can maintain a simple conversation – ask for
directions, talk about mutual likes and dislikes, invite a girl to a
hotel – I think I'll be satisfied.

About Me

I've been studying Japanese language and culture since 2004 and have twice studied abroad to Kyouto. Veterans can enjoy my pratfalls, and newcomers should be able to gain some insight into life here. Maybe.